Action, Knowledge, and Representation

Abstract

In this paper I seek to decompose the concept of basic actions in such a way that its philosophical components crystallize about one pole, and its scientific ones about the other. No doubt the scientific components will have a philosophical importance, but it will differ considerably from the philosophical importance basic actions themselves were originally believed to have. The latter derived from the pivotal role basic actions were cast to play in a massive restructuring of the mind-body relationship along lines which promised to re-unite bodies with minds and ourselves with both: to restore to an ontological unity what had been sundered by cartesian dialysis. That counter-cartesian program I now believe to have failed definitively, and its collapse, which I mean to demonstrate, entails the demolition of the concept of basic actions, at least so far as its hopeful philosophical significance is concerned. I hasten to mute this dour assessment, however: Descartes does not survive altogether the confounding of his rivals, only his distinctions do. But this does not compel us to follow him in housing the terms of the distinction in logically alien substances.

And yet they ought to have made some mention of error at the same time, for error seems to be more natural to living creatures, and the soul spends more time in it. Aristotle, De Anima